20 August 2013

Samantha Hall needs a fresh startBroken
hearted and alone in a new city, Samantha begins to build a new life
for herself while working as a bartender. Focusing on her new friends
and rebuilding her broken life, Samantha is content. Until she
meets him – attorney by day and a cocky, foul mouth playboy by night.
All girls want Slade Long, but not one has ever been able to keep his
attention for long. Having a different woman in his bed every night is
how he prefers it-no emotion, no connection. Until he meets her -
an angel with the sweetest voice he has ever heard and the most
enticing green eyes. Samantha makes him second guess his actions and has
him wanting something he didn’t know existed. How can a man who has
never been in love, be so sure? Can real love happen this fast? Burned
by her past, Samantha struggles to keep up with the overwhelming
passion she feels for Slade. She knows that he will be nothing but
trouble to her already fragile heart, but how long can she continue to
deny the love that she feels for him? Will Samantha let Slade prove his love is real, or will she push him away? She thought she knew love…… He thought he never wanted love….. Together they will show each other what they can’t live without.

Ok, so I'm a bit
conflicted about this book. Mostly because I read it very quickly; it
totally sucked me in, but at about 65% in it a got a bit tedious. I
mean, maybe I'm the wrong age group for this book, since I'm 35, but
there's only so many accounts of drunken debauchery that I'm really
into reading about. Dear characters: bad things happen when you
drink, so you need to stop.

There, I feel better.

Now,
the overall plot to the book was pretty good. Womanizing bad-boy
(Slade) meets sweet girl next door type (Sam). I liked Slade, but I
didn't really like Sam all that much. I mean, she's a really damaged
person and at the end of the book when you find out why...it was a
letdown for me. It just felt REALLY manufactured and unrealistic. And
completely rushed. Some of the stuff that we come to find out later
had nothing to do with the overall plot could have been left out,
like the bar fights, and more time spent on the emotional resolution
that should have been the cornerstone of the book. Yeah, that didn't
happen. It just threw it all together in about the last 3%. I mean, I
can't tell if this was a cliffhanger or not, that's how it left me.
Is there going to be another book?

I will say this: the author
can write. It's obvious. But this does not feel like a final draft to
me. There were MANY editing mistakes that really detracted from the
book overall. I’m not normally a stickler for things like that,
but it really bothered me here. The flow of the story, the grammar
and word usage really needs to be fixed. Fix those things, this is
easily a 4 star book, maybe more.

Overall, I did like this
book. As I said, even with some of the negatives, I read it fast and
found it engaging. As it stands now, I give it 3 stars. If there’s
a follow up, I’ll read it!